Posts Tagged 'Cpanel'

For the past two days, SoftLayer set up shop at the 2014 cPanel® Conference held in Houston, TX. We mingled. We administered the Server Challenge II (more on that later) . . . And, we talked to Aaron Phillips, chief business officer at cPanel.

Holy cup of coffee; this guy has so much energy! Clad in shorts, a t-shirt, and Adidas Gazelle’s, this CBO was not what I expected, but neither is cPanel for that matter. Reading Phillips’ bio offers a glimpse into the cPanel culture; he pokes fun at the fact he never thought he would be working for a “company started by a 14-year-old genius.”(Maybe that’s why he can get away with the shorts.)

Regardless, you can’t dismiss cPanel’s expertise when it comes to specializing in control panel software. The cPanel software package automates server tasks by providing an accessible interface to help website owners manage their sites.

So Aaron, can you give us a brief overview of what the cPanel conference is all about?

The cPanel Conference is in its ninth year, and we really put this together to network, talk about web hosting, and give our partners a sneak peek at what we’re up to. I attended the event even before I came onboard at cPanel, and each year just gets bigger and better. It’s the conference I look forward to each year.

Oh yeah? Any big announcements this week?

Yep. We have a new update to our system. Our user interface is available in 29 languages. It’s really going to help our global customers and help our partners that have global customers like SoftLayer.

How so?

The quality of translations have improved dramatically. The older system we called LANG often created partial sentences which caused a lot of problems with translations. Our ‘newer model,’ Maketext, is more flexible and feature rich. We’ve also edited our content on the interface making it easier to translate. This also eases translation in languages read from right-to-left.

When do you anticipate a go-live date?

We’re in the beta stage but will be complete soon. Like, any day now.

Speaking of SoftLayer, what does cPanel think of us?

You guys were one of our first customers, and you’re one of our biggest customers. We go way back . . . like EV1 days. We love you guys over at SoftLayer. Enjoy the conference! Gotta run.

[Maybe that’s why he wears the Gazelle’s].

Speaking the Language – 29 Languages

Arabic

French

Japanese

Spanish

Chinese

German

Korean

Swedish

Czech

Greek

Latin American Spanish

Thai

Danish

Hebrew

Malay

Traditional Chinese

Dutch

Hungarian

Norwegian

Turkish

English

Iberian Spanish

Polish

Ukrainian

Filipino

Indonesian

Portuguese

Vietnamese

Finnish

Italian

Romanian

The Server Challenge II Continues to Kick aaS and Take Names
We don’t like to brag, but we have the best booth setup of all time. Why? Because of the Server Challenge II. We would like to congratulate Mike Levine, Product Manager at OpenSRS (with the high score of 1:00.05) who beat out the hundreds of contenders who participated at the 2014 cPanel Conference.

As I mentioned in my last post about CSF configuration in iptables, I'm working on a follow-up post about integrating CSF into cPanel, but I thought I'd inject a simple iptables use-case for bandwidth tracking. You probably think about iptables in terms of firewalls and security, but it also includes a great diagnostic tool for counting bandwidth for individual rules or set of rules. If you can block it, you can track it!

The best part about using iptables to track bandwidth is that the tracking is enabled by default. To see this feature in action, add the "-v" into the command:

You can see the packet and byte transfer amounts to track the INPUT — traffic to a destination port on your server. If you want track the amount of data that the server is generating, you'd look for OUTPUT from the source port on your server:

Keep in mind that every time a packet passes through one of your rules, it will eat CPU cycles. Diverting all your traffic through 100 rules that track bandwidth may not be the best idea, so it's important to have an efficient ruleset. If your server has eight processor cores and tons of overhead available, that concern might be inconsequential, but if you're running lean, you could conceivably run into issues.

The easiest way to think about making efficient rulesets is to think about eating the largest slice of pie first. Understand iptables rule processing and put the rules that get more traffic higher in your list. Conversely, save the tiniest pieces of your pie for last. If you run all of your traffic by a rule that only applies to a tiny segment before you screen out larger segments, you're wasting processing power.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you do not need to specify a target (in our examples above, we established tracking and tracking2 as our targets). If you're used to each rule having a specific purpose of either blocking, allowing, or diverting traffic, this simple tidbit might seem revolutionary. For example, we could use this rule:

[root@server ~]$ iptables -A INPUT

If that seems a little bare to you, don't worry ... It is! The output will show that it is a rule that tracks all traffic in the chain at that point. We're appending the data to the end of the chain in this example ("-A") but we could also insert it ("-I") at the top of the chain instead. This command could be helpful if you are using a number of different chains and you want to see the exact volume of packets that are filtered at any given point. Additionally, this strategy could show how much traffic a potential rule would filter before you run it on your production system. Because having several of these kinds of commands can get a little messy, it's also helpful to add comments to help sort things out:

Nothing terribly complicated about using iptables to count bandwidth, right? If you have iptables rulesets and you want to get a glimpse at how your traffic is being affected, this little trick could be useful. You can rely on the information iptables gives you about your bandwidth usage, and you won't be the only one ... cPanel actually uses iptables to track bandwidth.

HostingCon 2011 in San Diego may have been a huge success for SoftLayer, but I walked away with a different experience following my intense pursuit of building the PHIL's DC brand. Apparently, the hosting industry wants to see my data center succeed before they believe it, and I think it's really just fear rearing its ugly head. People are afraid of what they don't understand, so the uninitiated would probably be terrified as they try to learn what I'm doing.

In an effort to help some of the bigger names in the hosting industry get in on the ground floor of PHIL's DC, I took a stroll down the HostingCon aisles. Vendors like Parallels and cPanel were obvious choices to discuss business partnerships, and I was sure TheWHIR wanted the scoop on the next big thing in hosting, so I made sure to give them all a chance to speak with me. The documentary film team I hired (the guy I met outside the San Diego Convention Center who said he'd follow me with a camera for $3.50/hour) recorded our interactions for posterity's sake:

I'd like send shouts out to thank Candice Rodriguez from TheWHIR, Aaron Phillips from cPanel and John McCarrick from Parallels for agreeing to let us film our organic interactions. They've further inspired me to build a data center that will make these apparent "snubs" and "rejections" a thing of the past. To Summer and Natalie at the SoftLayer booth: Please stop making fun of my Server Challenge attempt every time you see me at the office ... I think I had something in my eye when I was competing, so it wasn't a fair measure of my skillz.

Oh, and if you didn't get a chance to attend our "Geeks Gone Wild" party at HostingCon, you'd probably be interested in seeing video from The Dan Band's performance of "Total Eclipse of the Heart," cPanel posted it here: http://www.vimeo.com/28160105 (NSFW language, The Dan Band take artistic license with profanity)

Next week a crowd of SoftLayer peeps are making the H-Town connection at cPanel Conference 2009. Representatives from the support, operations, sales, development, and management teams will be out in full force meeting, greeting, and learning. The conference is from Monday Oct 5 to Wednesday Oct 7 at the Hilton Americas Houston Hotel. Stop by our booth if you'd like to chat. We're throwing a reception for our awesome customers and partners at the lobby bar on Monday at 9pm. If that's not enough, yours truly will be giving a talk on Tuesday about how to extend cPanel and WHM through a 3rd party API. Y'all get three guesses as to whose API we're showing off. :) Bring your ripest fruits and vegetables and ready your air horns. It's been a while since I've had a good, old-fashioned heckling.

Come on out if you can make it. We love getting to know the folks who pay our salaries. ;) See you there!